Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Savannah VM system upgrades

[Bob Proulx]

Bob Proulx wrote:
> Next steps are cleaning old config files (*.dpkg-* and *.ucf-*) and
> "obsolete conffiles from init.d" if any so as to have things clean.
> Then the upgrade.  Probably ready to reboot tomorrow to the latest
> kernel that will get installed.

All done.  The mgt VM has been upgraded.  Please let me know if you
find any problems.

There is a problem left unresolved yet.  Michael and I were chatting
on IRC about the problem.  Here is a summary of the issue.

The user accounts in /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and /etc/shadow are
managed through a sysync process.  The intent is to manage added
accounts across the collection of VMs.

This comes into conflict with users created by packages when they are
installed.  A package is installed and creates a new local account for
a pseudo user.  Then the sysync management process removes this
unmanaged account.  Then another package is installed and creates
another local pseudo account and reuses the same uids.  This causes
several packages to have the same pseudo users with duplicated uids.
Some duplicated uids are problematic and need to be fixed on mgt.

At the moment we don't have a solution.  Yet.  It is the next thing to
figure out.  I am thinking that sysync should be modified to ignore
accounts less than a specified min configured value.  But ideas are
still flowing.  More on this later.  It needs to be solved to finish
the cleanup and before we work through the other VMs.

Bob